Who am I?

Moses' second question to God at the burning bush was,

Who are you?

So I'll go to the Israelites and say,

Your Father's God sent me to you,

and they'll immediately ask me what his name is.

What shall I say to them?

God's reply, Ayah, she a yeah,

wrongly translated in almost every Christian Bible

as something like, I Am That I Am, deserves an essay

in its own right, and in fact I wrote about it in my book's Future Tense and the Great Partnership.

But his first question was me on Oakie, who am I? Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, said Moses to God. And how can I possibly get the

Israelites out of Egypt? Now, on the surface, his meaning is clear. Moses is asking two things.

The first is, who am I to be worthy of so great a mission? And the second is, how can I possibly

succeed? And God answers the second second because I will be with you

you'll succeed because I'm not asking you to do it alone I'm not really asking you to do it at all

I'll be doing it for you I want you to be there as my representative my mouthpiece my emissory

and my voice but God never answered the first question. Perhaps in a strange way Moses answered

himself. In Tanakh as a whole, the people who turn out to me the most worthy are the ones

who deny they are worthy at all. The prophet Isaiah, when charged with his mission, said,

I'm a man of unclean lips. Jeremiah said, I can't speak for I am a child.

David, Israel's greatest king, echoed Moses' words,

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